


Things to do after refusing a marriage proposal

by orphan_account



Category: Captain Fantastic (2016)
Genre: Awkwardness, F/M, First Time, Fix-It, Slight D/S Vibes, don't expect too much sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-27
Updated: 2016-11-27
Packaged: 2018-09-02 15:12:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8672245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Claire steps in front of him, grabs his hands, so his eyes focus and he understands when she tells him to wait. She follows her mom into the trailer, and he can hear the occasional bust of laughter seeping trough the walls. Finally, after a time which is not long enough for his shock to pass, the door opens, and she is there with a stack of blankets under her arm.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I interpret Bodevan to be over 18 and Claire about his age too (especially in this fic), so I didn't tag this underage, but beware if this might squick you, especially since he is somewhat innocent (for lack of a better word). The shametastic proposal scene is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJk-9yD-nTY , if you want to die again from second-hand embarrassment.

He feels it being awkward and wrong as he is making his misguided, shameful, freaky speech, but he doesn't know how to make it better, so his attempts to make it more clear and pure just add to the avalanche of horror. His hearth is in overdrive and he can barely hear in his panic. The laughter of Claire and her mom do break trough the haze, though, and he wants nothing more than sinking into the ground.

Claire steps in front of him, grabs his hand, so his eyes focus and he understands when she tells him to wait. She follows her mom into the trailer, and he can hear the occasional bust of laughter seeping trough the walls. Finally, after a time which is not long enough for his shock to pass, the door opens, and she is there with a stack of blankets under her arm. “Remember, no children out of wedlock”, her mother teases her from the door, and a giggle does escape her before she could turn back for her obligatory daughterly eyeroll.

Bodevan feels completely disoriented, but Claire's free hand is sneaked around his elbow, and he just follows her lead. It takes him the time needed to cross the tennis court to be able to whisper “I'm sorry”. She answers “It's ok, come on” as if it wouldn't be a big deal, which does not make him understand the situation any better.

They end up in a deserted picnic area, with bushes scattered around them and with the view of the stars partially obstructed by trees and light pollution from the city nearby. Claire spreads one of the blankets on the ground, puts the other one in the corner, and sits cross-legged on the margin, her soles over the ground. He mirrors her movement, occupying a place that feels too close and too far away in the same time.

“So, just for the record, I obviously won't marry you, but you don't have to be ashamed either. You are strange and your family story is obviously false, but you are well-meaning and smart” (and fucking beautiful, she thinks, but one thing at a time), “so I trust you will get better. You don't even have to share the truth with me, if you don't want to. I just hope you are safe and free now, at least.”

Talking to her requires a constant effort of decoding and translation, but making his situation into “safe and free” feels harder than recreating her mother as a government agent who is alive, and he realizes with a chill that he is not sure he even wants to stretch the truth that far. But Claire is watching, so he needs to say something. It ends up “It'll be okay.”

She raises her hand to put a strand of his hair back behind his ear, then lowers it back hesitantly.

“Also, I want to ask if you feel like it's worth it to relate to people temporarily. Because I like you, and I feel good hanging out, and I know that we will go in different directions, but it is worth it for me. Sorry for the question, but you seem to think in black or white, everything or nothing, and I don't want you to be too sad after. Like, dragging you here felt right, but... you know.”

He does consider it, and the reflex reaction of his overdeveloped self-control is to stay away. Then he gets angry, because this fear of pleasure and connections is what christianity was supposed to indoctrinate people with, especially around sex. He feels that he permitted himself to get attracted as long as he made himself believe in some perfect harmony between their worldviews, trying to trick his internal policeman by forcefully misinterpreting her, but he does not understand most of her references and her leftism is corrupted by socialdemocracy, and she is still interesting and whole. The world was supposed to be composed of their little family of rebels and a homogenous mess of outsiders, made subhuman by the system, even if saying it out loud was taboo and one was supposed to feel solidarity together with the (implicit) pithy. But he doesn't feel any of those now, he just want to get close and is afraid of being too much of a freak to be allowed to, the hierarchy of humanity spinning and their (objectively superior) way of being oscillating between that and being shameful, weird and small. Suffocating. He feels lonely and wants to yell at the so-called humanistic and life-affirming values that made him a frustrated freak. He honestly does not know how much will it cost for him to get over this, but he feels defiant. It can't be worse than running away, again.

“I want to stay here, if I may.”

She moves closer. A good part of the conversation seems to take place inside his head, but she is comfortable with leaving him be. He seems as noble as lost, and if the basic loveliness of making out after knowing each other for a few hours will also happen to be some life-changing event for this beautiful boy, her ego won't exactly complain. She wants to protect him from his shame, make the mess even a bit better, and if in the real world this means shouldering some of the awkwardness in the conversation, then she is willing to pay. It feels silly to talk so explicitly and carefully to a guy about her intentions, but she can't trust that any implicit messages would end up received in this case, not after that mess of a declaration, so she will keep asking. The teacher who did the sex ed module for her class would be proud. 

“And what's your position on casual touching and kissing? Sex?”

He raises his hand to caress her cheek, at least understanding the permission implicitly given, and his fingers are very gentle and just a tiny bit shaking. She leans in for a kiss, and like before, most of the absurd metaphors he has read in books do turn out to make sense. It feels somehow sweet, even if it is not literally so.

They are somewhat slower this time, but she keeps getting closer, maneuvering him after a while to lay on his back on the center of the blanket and climbs over him on hands and knees. A bit like the egyptian sky godess Nut covering the earth god Geb, it crosses his mind, the reproduction from their tattered art history album burnt deeply into his mind. Her body is not covered by stars, but she takes off her bra and guides his hands under her shirt, which is better. He caresses and kisses in wonder and having no actual idea what to do, but it seems to be working, thanks the universe.

She touches him under his shirt, too, and he quickly takes it off just to make her more comfortable before he could get embarrassed about the way the gesture could be seen at narcissistic on his part. She straddles him sitting up, the pressure on his groin making him squirm off the ground for a moment, and her hands roam his chest, his biceps, his arms, pushing and squeezing, enjoying the muscles. He raises his arms eagerly in the direction her touches seem to be nudging them, lets himself be guided and is overjoyed by the way the weight of responsibility is falling off his shoulders. She corrects the position of his arms over his head, and he is overtaken by passivity. He wants to give all of himself to her. She must be seeing this on his face, elated, with his eyes closing and his mouth open, because she uses one hand to push both of his to the ground, stretched to a line over his head and hanging out from the blanket, as she uses the other to stroke his stomach. She is watching intently, predator-like, and he is lost in her eyes. 

The guy with the invented name seems to be deeply shaken by her every moment, and things are turning from endearing to exciting. The artifices of pretend-power would seem embarrassingly cliche, as gestures go, but his wide-eyed openness makes her follow her impulses anyway, even if her fantasies feel a bit shivery being out in the cold air of real life. She turns his passivity a dare, exploring how much she can push forward and still feel like herself, just more free. Her momentary power-over-him is shifting and is not put into precise words even in her head, but it is obvious that it's deeply entangled with her urge to protect. Her position over him, with her legs bracketing his hips and her free hand now cupping his jaw, is satisfying for both.

She keeps touching him, leaving his skin oversensitive. When her hand wanders lower, scratching the hair that leads down towards his penis, he moans and her hand retracts. The time she needs to sit down next to him and arrange her thoughts is enough for the shame to get uncovered in him, again. Was he behaving well enough, or did he seem demanding? He is supposed to be generous and care less about his own satisfaction than hers, unlike patriarchal men, but he should also accept that she is allowed to have a libido, too, and the contradictory bits and pieces of theories shift into a field of traps he can't find a safe way across. He should be perceptive to her and be in the present, but here he is, lost in theory. The paranoid arguments seem to grow around his basic incapability to believe to be wanted like that. His mind creaks and still can't bend itself in the shape needed to accept it.

What she actually ends up saying is “eeer, ah, can I give you a handjob? No obligations, and I would use a latex glove because of personal hypochondria, don't take it as an insult”, which is surprising to hear from the discoursive hole he has been digging himself into at that point, but he manages to be understandable enough for his mumbling to count as actual consent. “And the glove is ok, your boundaries are sacred, and I'm not anti-technology like that, you are so good to me, I would say that I don't deserve it but it would position your acts in a framework of obligations, which” - but then she is already moving back to her previous position, interrupting him with a kiss, pushing his wrists to the grass and then biting down to her neck, so the end of that sentence is lost. “Shut up and look at me”, she says, and he does exactly that until his orgasm makes him lose his focus, even as he manages to keep his eyes open.

When he can concentrate again, he is seeing the actual starts, and then turns to cuddle as close to her as possible, putting his hands finally around her and floating in a current that could bring him to cry just as well as to laugh. She whispers wonderful things to him, with a hand in his hair, and he comes down from his high to a state of tranquility he could have barely hoped for. 

Later, when their caresses grow bold again, his hand ends up invited to touch her everywhere. She seems to be enjoying his exploration and then keeps participating in getting herself off, giving clear directions and intertwining his fingers with hers. He is not judged for his skills as a provider, his lack of familiarity with an anatomy unlike his own turning into a moral failure, but invited to play with someone who does not expect him to know all the rules from the beginning. He is wanting to help her feel good with every fiber of his being, and a good part of those good intentions manage to hit its target just by what he came into the situation knowing from his books, the warmth of his hand on her side and the sheer loveliness of seeing him care so much. The rest is gently channeled by non-judgemental words and gestures; unsurprisingly, he is a very good student. After they got themselves together, she asks him not to generalize from this encounter about which sexual activities are ok outside of a committed relationship and which aren't (which is unnecessary and awkward, but he appreciates her feeling responsible to avoid misinformation, even if she can't know where the limits of his knowledge actually lay). He carries the blankets as they walk back to her home, holding her hand gently in his free one. At the trailer they hug, share a short kiss made awkward by the chance that they are being watched from inside, then she kisses his forehead and wishes him good luck. He doesn't know what to say, so he just says it back, kisses her hand, and runs away, wanting to cut short the moment of separation.

He keeps running, enjoying using up the remains of the adrenaline generated that night. He takes the longest route home, because he will have to face his life at some point, confront his father about going to university and maybe help his siblings somehow too, but right now he is happy and alive and wants to not think about anything else. He decides on a whim to circle a pole, grabbing into it and circling it several times with the inertia from his run. By the time he collapses under it, he is fighting hard to keep his laughter quiet enough to not annoy the other campers. Nothing is funny, he is just happy. He is experiencing vertigo because of the centrifugal force of his movements have moved the fluid in the vestibular system of his inner ear in confusing ways, so now gravity doesn't feel right, but that goes very well with his general feelings today, too. So he just sits, grinning stupidly, and waits 'till a new sense of up and down slowly emerges.

 


End file.
